Have We Considered That Maybe Elon Musk Just Hated Twitter & The People Who Use It All Along?

I wasn’t going to write about Elon changing Twitter’s name and branding to X, because… who cares? I’m not sure what the point is. But, a lot of people have been asking me my thoughts, and the more I was trying to parse it all out, the more confused I became. It basically only makes sense if Elon is trying to erase everything about Twitter, including the embarrassment that it’s caused since he took it over.

If you had $44 billion burning a hole in your pocket, and a (somewhat questionable) belief that what the world needed was a more international version of WeChat (which has become an “everything” app in China), it seems like it would make most sense to just build it from scratch. Instead, Elon Musk spent all that money (a decent chunk of it borrowed) to buy Twitter, fire around 85% of its staff, take on ridiculous legal liabilities by not living up to various contracts, and set fire to most of its advertising revenue and goodwill.

And now he’s decided to get rid of the Twitter name, logo, and branding.

And replace it all with “X.” Or, rather, 𝕏.

This isn’t exactly a new thing. Elon had laid out this exact plan back in 2022 soon after he announced his plans to buy Twitter. The day he announced that he was dropping his lawsuit to get out of the deal, and would move forward to close, he also said “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”

Of course, he also wrote: “Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years, but I could be wrong.”

Could be.

That said, as with most Elon pronouncements, it’s difficult to tell which ones actually come to fruition. Elon says an awful lot of crazy things that slowly fade away and never become reality. It often seems like he has late night ideas, announces them, and then leaves it up to his team to eventually build or… just let fade away when they know it’s not worth doing.

Apparently X is one of the ideas moving forward. There’s no need to point out that Elon’s always been obsessed with the letter X. He’s got a child that he calls “X.” His second company was X.com, and as it was failing it was merged into Confinity, which became PayPal, because the X name wasn’t working. Elon eventually bought the domain back from PayPal and has always talked about doing stuff with it. And, of course, there’s SpaceX and the Model X Tesla.

We get it. Elon likes the letter X.

As for the idea of making Twitter into WeChat, well, good luck with that. Five years ago, Christopher Chen wrote a good article about why a WeChat-for-the-US would never succeed, back when Facebook was hinting at building something similar (which never really took off). We’ve since seen lots of folks explain why such a plan is unlikely to succeed.

There are many different theories as to why, from cultural differences to regulatory differences, from different financial systems to different phone technology. Indeed, it seems that the closest we’ve come to “super apps” are actually based on different ecosystems, which include the phone infrastructure: Apple with iOS and Google with Android. Both have lots of apps (and also app stores) but also have been building in payments. It’s not clear to me that an app starting from a social network can get to the same position.

That said, many people will (correctly!) point out that Elon has a history of entering markets where the conventional system is “that can’t work” and then making it happen (EVs and private space flight being just two examples). Though, in the cases where he’s done that, the challenge has been more on the technical side, rather than the people/culture side. It will be interesting to see if he can actually break through on those. It’s certainly not impossible, but it strikes me as a long shot.

But, really, in thinking about the official change to “X,” it struck me as notable that Elon appears to want to completely burn down the brand value and cultural goodwill he had still been clinging to to keep Twitter afloat for many users. Calling things “tweets” and the the overall “sameness” of Twitter was a part of the inertia that kept people using the site. And he’s getting rid of all of it:

Back when he first discussed it, I could understand the idea that Elon’s plan to “accelerate” the creation of X as an everything app with Twitter was based on leveraging the things that Twitter had: a few hundred million users, a decent social graph, a reliable base of a revenue stream around advertisers that could be improved upon. As such, you could see how taking that, and then gradually extending the nature of the app to include a variety of other features, including payments and other services, could make sense.

But, instead, he’s basically set fire to all the things that actually made Twitter useful for that purpose. So, it’s difficult to see how turning Twitter into “X” accelerates anything useful at all. I can’t figure out how doing all this is a better strategy than just spending the money to start up X from scratch. He’s harmed the social graph. He’s harmed the value. He’s harmed the base of revenue. He’s certainly harmed his own reputation among many who now would never trust him with their money. Every move he’s done with Twitter seems to do more harm to the supposed “vision” of X than “accelerate” it.

And, at some point, the only conclusion seems to be that Elon never actually liked “Twitter.” Sure, he liked the attention that he got on Twitter. But the rest of Twitter, and the value to users other than himself never seemed to make much sense to him. So he’s burned it all down, and what’s left is an app where it’s only valuable if you are Elon Musk, or someone obsessed with Elon Musk. And, as that flails, his only solution is to try to turn it into something completely different. Something definitively not Twitter as an attempt to salvage every other mistake he’s made so far as being part of some grand strategy.

For everyone else, perhaps it’s only worth noting that the new logo of the app: “𝕏” should remind you that it’s time to close your app.